Gaming Life in Japan

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The incredibly non selling PS3. Plus, the latest commercials!

By Anoop Gantayat

It's official! Japan is now Nintendo Land. Two years of domination by the DS was topped off recently with a holiday season in which the Wii was the hottest console gaming ticket in town. Now, both the DS and the Wii are a tough find at retail.

The same can't be said about the former champ. While the PlayStation 3 was an impossible find during Christmas, stock began appearing at retail in the first week of the New Year. Strangely, the stock didn't disappear. The PS3 is now readily available at retailers throughout Japan.

This leaves us with a couple of possibilities. It could be the case that the system has been selling well, but Sony has been flooding the supply lines with units. Given that Sony managed to double its shipment count to over a million just after the holidays, this seemed like a strong possibility.

Until we saw the latest sales charts from Media Create, that is. You can see for yourself in the sales charts section a few pages down. The PS3 only managed about 25,000 units over the week long period between 1/8 to 1/14. During that time, we had no problem finding the system at retail, suggesting the lack of units was not due to supply constraints, but to a lack of demand.

This "sudden shipment" display has beenoutside this particular Bic Camera outlet inShibuya for two weeks now.

Not that we're too surprised. The PS3 has been pretty quiet here in Japan following launch. The December release list, which included Sonic, MotorStorm, F1, Need for Speed and Armored Core, didn't light up the sales charts with people rushing out to buy software for thier pricey new game player. January has been devoid of software as well.

In fact, the main attractions for the PS3 in Japan so far have been a couple of PlayStation Store downloads. Sony gave big commercial time to the free Gran Turismo 5 demo and the 2,000 yen Tekken 5 Dark Resurrection download.

But actual software is, at long last, on the way. Commercials have already started airing for Virtua Fighter 5, which hits retail on 2/8, just prior to its American release (see the commercial section for a cool VF5 spot). While not the big draw it was back in the 32 bit era, VF5 should manage to turn some attention to the PS3.

An even bigger event comes in the form of Gundam Musou. The unlikely pairing of Gundam and Dynasty Warriors seemingly came out of nowhere late last year, but is already gearing up for a March 1 release. The Gundam launch title is the best selling PS3 game so far in Japan, and Dynasty Warriors still continues to pull in strong sales on the PS2, so this could be the biggest PS3 hit yet.

With a few big hits, perhaps Sony will actually manage to sell some of that PS3 stock.